What Are Affiliate Links- Complete Guide For Beginners

This blog post can contain affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I may receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Please note that I only recommend products and services that I personally use and trust.

If you are reading this post it means that you want to know everything about affiliate links.

And of course, you want to know how you can earn a FULL-TIME income with your affiliate links.

According to Statista, businesses will be spending around $8.2 billion by 2022 in the US only.

That’s a huge amount of money that businesses are willing to pay affiliate marketers.

So, if you have the dream of earning a full-time income, affiliate marketing can be a very lucrative choice.

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What is an affiliate link?

An affiliate link is a link that you include on your website to promote other company’s products. When someone makes a purchase through your link, you earn a commission.

The long answer?

Well, for you to be able to use affiliate links effectively you will need to understand the whole process.

4 parties are involved in affiliate marketing:

The Vendor/Merchant (The person or companies who sells the product)
The Network (Affiliate companies)
The content publisher (You and me)
The consumer (the person who buys the product)

Let’s elaborate on each one of them.

Shall we?

The Vendor

The vendor( also called the merchant) is a person or company who created the product. It can also be a single person who created software or an E-book.

These people or companies use affiliate marketing to generate more sales for their products or services.

The network

These are affiliate programs that act as an intermediate between the affiliate marketer and the Vendor.

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For example, ShareASale is an awesome affiliate program that helps new bloggers to earn money with affiliate links. The advantage of using an affiliate program is that it will give you a list of all the products that are available for your niche in one single platform. This will greatly increase your effectiveness in tracking your progress.

The content publisher (also known as an affiliate)

The role of the content publisher is to suggest useful products to its audience. This is where the marketing happens.

A content publisher must convince people why a specific product will help them solve their problems and persuade the value of the product.

This is YOUR role and in return, you will be rewarded with a commission.

Right now you must be thinking: “How on earth can you even convince someone to buy a product”?

Well, don’t worry about that, by the end of this article you will know exactly how to do it effectively.

The consumer

The consumer can be anyone who buys the product. If you analyze it properly, you will see that the consumer is the most important person.

Without sales, there are no commissions to be earned.

So, the affiliate marketer must try everything to convince consumers to buy a specific product or service.

Now that you know all the parties involved, let’s see how your affiliate links work.

How do affiliate links work?

The Vendor or the Affiliate program will give you a unique link so that they can track your sales.

So, when someone clicks on the link, a small file usually called a “Cookie” gets stored on their devices.

The cookie is crucial as it:

Helps the Vendor or Affiliate network to track the sale.
It will help the affiliate earn a commission even if the purchase is made after a few weeks.

Usually, a cookie will stay on a consumer device for around 30-90 days. This will help you earn a commission even if the consumer doesn’t make a purchase on the first day.

How to use Affiliate links to generate a full-time income

Now that you know what affiliate links are, it’s time you learn how you can use them effectively.

You might think that earning money from affiliate marketing is very complicated or you need to learn a lot of new techniques.

Of course not.

It’s much easier than you think.

The most important thing is to follow these simples steps that will help you generate at LEAST a part-time income in just a few months.

That being said, the first step is to:

1. Choose your Affiliate program wisely

You must understand that the choice of the affiliate program will have a tremendous impact on your earnings.

There are many affiliate programs that you can choose from. But when you are new to affiliate marketing, you have to choose ShareAsale.

Why ShareASale?

Because it’s the best Affiliate program for new bloggers.

As a matter of fact, I have accounts with some affiliate programs which I thought will help me to generate a good income.

Boy, I was so wrong.

Till now, only ShareAsale is bringing income. For the other affiliate programs, I earned nothing. Not a single penny.

Also, I would like to inform you that ShareAsale has helped me to earn $20 in the first month of my blogging journey.

The setup is really very simple. You just have to provide some details and you are good to go.

CREATE YOUR FREE SHAREASALE ACCOUNT

2. Choose your affiliate links to maximize your income

Once you have created your account with ShareAsale, you will need to choose the right affiliate merchant.

ShareAsale has a lot of excellent merchants that will give you around 20%-40% commission for each sale.

But that’s not all.

There are affiliate merchants who will pay you a recurring commission.

What I mean by that is:

Suppose your reader sign-in for a monthly software service which is $20 per month. You will earn an initial commission of $8.

Ok, $8 doesn’t sound a lot.

BUT,

With 1 single client, you will earn $96 in a single year.

Ok $96 for 1 year is nothing to brag about.

Suppose you can generate 100 sales from 1 single affiliate merchant. It will be $9,600 for 1 year.

Now can you see the exponential effect of affiliate marketing?

It’s really amazing, isn’t it?

This is why so many bloggers are earning more than 50k per month.

So what are you waiting for?

START TO EARN MONEY RIGHT NOW

Pro tip: Please do make sure to be transparent with your audience that you have affiliate links in your content.

According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), you HAVE to be transparent when you receive an income from an endorsement.

3. Create better content

The way you structure your blog post has a huge impact on how well your affiliate links convert.

If your content is well-written and doesn’t have grammar errors people will trust your more and it will be proof that you are someone serious.

Trust is crucial to earning a massive amount of money with affiliate marketing.

Therefore, you must make sure that your content helps your audience and it doesn’t contain grammar errors.

If you are not using a grammar checker, then it’s high time you use one. It will make your content so much better.

The one that I am using is Grammarly. It’s the best Grammar checker on the web right now.

I cannot tell you how much Grammarly has helped me to make my content better.

In a nutshell, Grammarly will:

Eliminate grammar mistakes, spelling, and punctuation.
Fix inconsistencies in punctuation, formatting, and spelling throughout your content.
Ensure your word choices sound natural and fluent.
Make every sentence concise and easy to follow.
Identify sentences that readers may have to reread to understand and provide suggestions.
Find vivid words to give life to every message.
Ensure that your content is fresh and original by checking 16 billion web pages.

The awesome thing about Grammarly is that you can directly edit your content on your WordPress dashboard and Grammarly will suggest you any errors.

This feature has allowed me to update my content with more peace of mind and ease without having to paste the content outside of WordPress.

If you are not using Grammarly, then it’s about time to take your content to the next level.

And the awesome thing is that you can it’s completely free.

CREATE YOUR FREE GRAMMARLY ACCOUNT

4. Bring Targeted traffic to your site

Now that you have awesome content on your site, the next step is to bring TARGETED traffic so that more people can click and buy from your affiliate links.

Though you will get the best ROI (Return on Investment) from Google search results, it can take a lot of time to get enough traffic to see any momentum in your earnings.

Now, it doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO, it’s the best way to get constant traffic to your website.

That being said, what if you need traffic instantly?

Well, you can use social media to bring traffic to your website. You can either choose to invest money in Google or Facebook ads, or you can use Pinterest.

Why I am telling you to use Pinterest?

Well, because it’s the best social media that CAN generate massive traffic.

Many bloggers are getting around 100,000- 500,000 monthly pageviews from Pinterest.

That’s some serious traffic, isn’t it?

If you really want to generate a lot of targeted traffic to your new website, these resources will help you.

Related:

If you read these 3 articles and apply everything that is discussed, you WILL be able to generate enough traffic to earn a full-time income.

5. Getting clicks on your affiliate links

Now, this is the most important step which is crucial to be able to get enough clicks.

There are way too many people who complain that they are not able to generate enough clicks.

Well, if you follow what I am telling you, your chance of getting clicks will increase significantly.

How to increase your chance of getting more clicks:

Your links should be included in the body of your content. If you are placing affiliate links at the beginning and the end of your content, the chance of generating clicks will decrease a lot.

You should include your links in a way that doesn’t look spammy. Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you are reviewing a product and it looks like this: “Today, I am going to review this product. You can clearly see that the phrase looks spammy. A better way to put your affiliate link can be: Today, I am going to explain how this product can help you.
You can use Callouts buttons or boxes to grab your reader’s attention.

Final thoughts: What are affiliate links and how you can use them to generate a full-time income

Affiliate marketing can actually help you reach your goal(Full-time income) faster than anything else.

And the awesome thing about affiliate marketing is that you don’t need an insane amount of traffic to your website.

I hope this blog post will help you earn more money with your blog.

Pro Tip: Instead of applying for a wide range of affiliate programs, choose only a few which will help you maximize your earnings.

If you liked this post, please don’t forget to share it so that others can benefit from it.

See you soon!